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If a company decides to rely on an expert to create a window to the web he does to have an advertising return and wants to be located more quickly and comfortably than the old systems (e.g. yellow pages) as the potential customer relies increasingly on search engines like Google.

Unfortunately, not all webmasters, designers are often helped by Dreamweaver & Co, are aware of the dynamics necessary to satisfy the SEO company, then forced to turn to experts to optimize the visibility of your site.

The best case is the presence of an SEO expert in every field of web development company that creates an initial guideline and are consulted each year by the client to update the web space under the new rules SEO: remember that the web and its rules vary very quickly, updating the site code and content is essential for lasting results.

The worst case for the company that wants the site is well positioned to find a study of web development even without knowledge in SEO, at which point the company has to go to another studio or find a freelance SEO expert puts his hand the code and possibly a redesign of a project born evil, or to update.

This is clearly not the optimal situation even for the SEO expert who will have to hand code to others, placing emphasis on analyzing the structure of spider traps, check for broken links, robots.txt misconfigured, not having a semantic structure (wireframe) lacking in content and so on.

So let’s see recommendations 4 and 4 things to avoid for a web agency that is planning the site of a customer and want to avoid him spending more money (possibly losing the contract when the customer will notice that your web provider is “lame”) offering rather than a service with bows and complete 100%.

4 things to do to provide a quality product:

Planning

The site must be planned together with an SEO expert right from the first drafts, by studying the semantics, the positioning of various frames, the right keywords.

Access

The collaboration must be horizontal: the SEO expert must have decision-making power in the team and give advice during the chosen code, create a site with perfect code badly positioned just a waste of time.

Communication

The coder needs to communicate at any time of the project on choices, ideas and possible errors with the expert in SEO. It should not be a consultant but a real team member.

Competence

Although the company has knowledge of SEO does not mean that I know what an expert. The SEO changes dramatically, just see the news in the social environment. Having a full-time SEO worker who knows the news is essential to have a result: if the web development company is large enough there is definitely need more experts – why pay 10 programmers flash and then have only an expert in optimization and positioning on search engines? And ‘counterproductive.

4 things to do to be filled with problems:

Wait

Show the wireframe to SEO expert to work day after day is over or even very serious mistake. If you follow the expert advice to assist the team, may be too late and having to redesign entire pages.

Afraid

The team should not be afraid to see the creativity stifled by the expert in SEO: working together to find viable solutions, achieving a balance between creativity and accessibility.

Underestimate

Many webmasters think that the SEO expert is only a marginal figure of the team: the result is to underestimate the SEO aspect and get a website invisible to search engines and therefore useless. If the SEO is not in accord with the design ideas should not hide our heads in the sand and ignore it but you have to ask alternative routes.

Seek Perfection (no reach)

If your SEO expert is competent and the team did not collaborate in the production process need to be afraid to launch the site. You have to constantly worry about instead of work: often the most common mistake is to start well and then rest on their laurels.

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It’s apparent that in this new era of information technology, having a website is important to almost all businesses. However, many business owners, usually from small and medium sized companies have completed up their websites and then found them not performing to expectations. This is especially common for business owners setting up website for the first time. Here are 10 common mistakes made by business owners, and how to avoid them.

1. Cutting cost and using freelancers. We all know someone or at least know someone who knows someone else who knows a little about web programming. However, the job of a complete website is not to be handled by just one person. You need a creative designer to handle the aesthetic look and feel, and then an experienced programmer to handle the coding. Overall, you need an experienced coordinator who knows the important elements of websites and to propose the right ones to suit your business.

2. Selecting a web design company based on Price. Despite it being obvious, many business owners starting their website for the first time fail to understand that a lower price quantitatively does not actually equate or work out eventually. Be sure to compare the specifications and not just the price.

3. Writing contents themselves or using own friends or staffs to write the contents. You may swear that you understand your business more than anyone else but if you are not trained in website contents development, you will lose out two benefits that copywriters can provide. Trained website contents development can plan targeted keywords into your contents to increase the chances of others finding your website after it’s launched. Having good copywriters will also increase the chances of you making more sales, as they are able to write better and also incite in your readers an element of trust and invoke the desire to take up your services.

4. Under utilizing the capabilities of their website. As many business owners are not trained in IT (Information Technology) or have sufficient knowledge in the field of web development, they often restrict their website to basic functions, and forgetting that they can achieve higher efficiency by incorporating certain functions required by their business to their website.

5. Losing focus on website’s objectives. It’s quite common for new business owners pointing out that they want a Full Flash website, or a website with exciting and interactive navigation. More often than not, these new business owners forget that their main objectives in developing their website – which in most cases are to increase sales leads.

6. Not knowing what is a Landing Page. A landing page is referred to the page in which your web advertisement will lead your browsers to land upon. It need not be the Home Page, although it’s possible to optimize your Home Page to be a good Landing Page. Most often than not, a sale is done based on the first impression of your clients landing at your website. As such, it’s important to keep in mind in selecting a web design company who understands the importance of a landing page.

7. Not allocating a budget for marketing website. This is especially common for those who are new to website, thinking that their website will automatically have visitors or customers flowing in. Most website design packages these days come with submission to search engines as well as meta keywords. However, these are just basic elements of Search Engine Optimization, and have minimal impact to increase your visitors.

8. Spending time and / or money experimenting on advertising & marketing. Most business owners, especially small and medium sized, tend to think that they can cut cost and handle their own advertising and publicity. However, there are important lessons involved in terms of driving qualified traffic to website, and getting professional help often results in a higher return on investment.

9. Not updating and improving the website. A website is like your best salesman introducing your business to customers walking by. Your best salesman has to be updated with new products or services, as well as be taught on using new slogans to attract more sales. As such, it is paramount to keep your website updated with new contents, especially if you are using your website to generate enquiries for business.

10. Skimping on Images. A nice looking website requires nice looking photographs. Fortunately, these photographs can now be purchased easily through stock banks nowadays. There are usually two practices in the web design industry – one offers a certain amount of free photos, which they already factor a lump sum in their packages, while another practices buying what you like only.

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As a web developer, one thing that helps me to rapidly develop web applications is to use a common application framework that is flexible and robust. Additionally, I like to use code generators to build code for custom applications I build for my client. My most powerful code generators, create code for interacting with the local database dedicated to my website.

Normally, it is bad practice to repeat code when doing development. However, there are certain instances when this can be beneficial and assist in creating dynamic web applications. Here, we will discuss some of the many applications that I have found useful and how you can apply them to your own business.

Object-Oriented Classes

One way I enforce code reuse is by using object-oriented design. For my data access layer I create an abstract class which contains the common functionality. Next, I create derived classes which implement the specific methods which are needed for the entity model (usually a database table).

These derived classes have different fields which represent the fields defined for the table. They also contain mappings for the primary keys, any related fields that are retrieved from related tables, and custom methods for querying the database. The idea is that all of the database calls are encapsulated in the data access layer classes.

These derived classes have enough similarities between one another that it made sense for us to build a code generator to create these files from the database schema.

How to Generate Code in Your Intranet

On our intranet, we have the code generated connected directly to our database management scripts. When an administrator is viewing a table schema, they have a button on the bottom of the screen to generate the code for our data access layer. When the user presses this button, the code is immediately generated and the user can click anywhere on the code to select the code block and copy it to the clipboard.

The process of generating code is surprisingly simple. We simply retrieve the schema from the database and from that we define all the macros that are needed to substitute into a code template. These macros include things such as the script name, database table name, primary key fields, public fields, private fields, and a generated class name.

The code is output to the screen as pre-formatted text. Below this is a web form where the user may tweak any of the macro values that were generated. After making changes to these values, they can click a submit button which regenerates the code using the custom macro values. Of course this step is optional. The user may simply choose to copy all of the program code and paste it in their code editor and continue making changes that way.

Table Administration

In my website administration panel, I have a lot of pages that are built for managing database tables. I have a very capable library which handles all of the heavy lifting for paging through a table of records, creating a new record, editing and deleting a record. This is an object-oriented class that takes a variable number of parameters.

To create a new administration area, I just need to instantiate this class, define all of the required properties, and then call a method called “Process”. The resulting file is usually no longer than 25 lines of code. Creating these files doesn’t take very long when done by hand. However, I knew that creating a code generator for these server-side scripts would save us a lot of time.

Again, the key to accomplishing this goal was to first read the database schema for a table to get all of the field definitions. From these definitions, it would be a simple matter to create the code from an existing script template. I just define macros for all of the properties I need to substitute in the template. As the table schema is read, I build these properties which are later substituted in to the template.

Special Considerations

When generating code, it is important to keep in mind how the script is going to be used. In my data access layer scripts, I know that they are usually two directories beneath the website root. Because of this, I know that any relative links need to go up two levels to get to the site root.

Another important area to consider is form validation. There are certain constraints you can place on a web form to limit the amount of characters a user enters into a text field. You can even make Boolean fields display as radio buttons labeled “Yes” and “No”. Date fields can display using a specialized date picker.

Other special data fields can be displayed based on the field name. For example, fields containing the word “Password” can be displayed as password fields. I use fields with the name “created” and “modified” to track when a record has been changed. Fields that have the text “email” could be validated to make sure they contain a valid email address. Also, fields that have the text “postalcode” could be tested for valid postal codes.

I try to build my code generator so it is as smart as can be. The thinking behind this is that the developer can easily remove extra code that was added if they find too much validation is being done or the wrong type is done. The more work you can save for the developer, the better off you will be in the long run.

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